Tag Archives: edinburgh myths

The December dawn violated the night sky, ploughing runnels of crimson and ochre in its wake, like a giant taloned hand gouging fresh wounds over old. Or maybe that was just how I was feeling at eight am on a Monday morning having kept myself awake with a mix of Red Bull and whisky for the second night in a row.

The reason for my devoted vigil was snarling and snapping at me in the dark depths of the living room and the only thing keeping me alive was the circle of protection I had cast as an afterthought, never dreaming I’d actually be in need of it. While that was a big bully for me, I had no idea how long it would hold or what to do when it broke.

But that was not my most pressing problem – there was another darker behemoth lurking underneath that disturbed me more. This creature defiling my house and every waking moment for two interminable days had in fact been stalking me between worlds since I could remember. So long in fact, I’d begun to forget about it, sheltered as I was by the strong wards that guarded my flat. But someone had broken those wards and if I survived, I intended to find out who that particular meddling bastard was and arrange their imminent, screaming demise.

The thing glared at me with red, slanted eyes, howling like a banshee until the ringing in my ears eclipsed the sight of the triple rows of its mismatched teeth.

The protective circle chose that moment to break. It was on me in one loping bound, malformed jaws snapping for the fresh meat of my throat.

But there are worse fates than being eaten alive and I was about to find out the hard way just what they were….

The thing clinging to the living-room ceiling winked at me and, wiggling its little backside, vented the contents of its bowels on the corpse in the half-open casket beneath. It giggled, a high girlish sound and scuttled to the corner of the room where it hung upside down, watching me and rubbing its six fingered hands over vestigial ears like a monstrous, mutated bat.

Not paying it any attention, I picked my way through the wrecked furniture, moved aside the teetering piles of clothes on the hitherto untouched fake leather sofa, and sat down. Sure enough, within a couple of minutes, the creature began to creep back towards the centre of the room and the dead body. Posing for a moment like a prize diver showing off a new move, it dropped down onto the open portion of the casket where it began to dry hump the stiff with more vigour than skill. While I certainly knew that feeling well enough, I also knew something the creature did not: that in life as in showbiz, timing was everything.

Beyond the window, night smothered the remaining light. Not a difficult task given this was the desiccated heart of winter with its perpetual dark only ever leavened by shades of grey.
I had already broken my own rule of not getting caught after sundown here in Gilmerton, a village only just within city limits that didn’t have any other boundaries which dared apply. Perhaps that was why, in true old fashioned pioneer spirit, the hardy soul that had survived here for the past two years only thought he had a poltergeist to deal with. I couldn’t wait to tell him that it was so much worse than something that just wanted to throw a few pots and pans around.

A phlegmy chuckle was muffled by whatever the thing was doing to the corpse, a woman of indeterminate age – although given the part of town I was in she could easily have been anything under thirty. Isa Simpson had been a big woman, someone the quacks would have classified as morbidly obese. The collapsed lower third of her face and missing lips indicated an absence of teeth and grey, straggling hair struggled to make it to her shoulders. Her distraught brother Alec Simpson had told me that the whole sorry business had begun last week when she’d died of a heart-attack. Furniture had been thrown including plates and cutlery, some of which had struck their two little nephews glancing blows and injured the dog. Worst of all, no one could get near the body to take it for burial due to the hail of missiles which had ensued when they’d tried.

A feral growling reminded me why I was here. Crossing the room, I took the scrying glass out of my pocket and, ignoring the humper, positioned the obsidian surface to reflect the corpse’s face. Scrying glasses, if you made them properly and had the eyes to see, showed not just the surface of things, but also any lurking behemoths awaiting the chance to break through.

And there it was: reflected in the polished glass was a fluttering of eyelids that should have been well beyond that type of tease. I edged forward to get a better look, making sure I didn’t touch the monstrous little bastard – time enough for that later. I moved the glass closer and the creature paused in its labours for a few seconds, before whipping round to goggle at me in exaggerated horror, its jaw dislocating itself and stretching all the way down to its bony knees, like a Looney Tunes cartoon. But there was nothing funny about that vast maw, flipped open to reveal countless layers of jagged, yellow teeth. The skin was black and lustrous like a seal, broken by protruding outcrops of malformed bone jutting out all over the head. It was as though it couldn’t decide what species of creature it had wanted to be and had tried out several, not liking any of them enough to evolve one way or the other. It stared at me out of the sewn up slits where its eyes should have been, tiny ticks of movement underneath, like pupae trying to hatch. The arms and legs were elongated with too many joints like a spider without any of its good points. I was sure of one thing: it was dead and it had stayed here for a very good reason.

Through the scrying-glass the news was dark indeed: a spectral face thrashed behind the dead flesh mask, mouth agape, like a negative of an old film with the sound turned down. A chunk of what had been the sideboard flew towards me and I ducked, missing a nasty concussion. We had been doing this dance for a good hour now and after my discovery with the scrying glass, I had to admit with a bitter, sinking heart, that we were going to be doing it a whole lot longer.
The creature laughed…..

It was drizzling that Tuesday, a sullen, persistent skin-soaker that matched the mood of the funeral taking place in Liberton Kirk’s municipal cemetery. Everything was going to plan until Aunt Bella gave an eldritch shriek and threw herself into her husband’s open grave, trying to prise the lid of the coffin open with bloodied nails. The rest of us gawped and looked on, struggling to come to grips with this one and only show of the closest thing to affection that we’d witnessed in their twenty-five year stretch together. You could have called it a loveless marriage on a good day, but so far they’d never had one of those and now it was too late.

She scrabbled at the coffin lid leaving bloody smears on the polished wood, blonde hair escaping from its chignon and sticking to her blotched, mascara-stained face. The too short, too tight skirt she’d been wearing had rucked up in the fall and a hint of bright red underwear was all too visible against the black suit and rich brown of the freshly dug earth: a wound in tender flesh.

Uncle Monty started to scramble down after her but paused when she began writhing around and clutching her stomach, mouth open as though about to vomit. I wondered for an irrational moment if we were going to be treated to an Alien type scene culminating in Bella bursting open on the grave of her barely beloved.

But as always truth was stranger than fiction.

Two unfeasibly attractive young guys I’d never seen before leapt down into the grave and manhandled the lucky widow back out. They managed to prop her up against a gravestone all the while talking to her in low soothing tones while she nodded and sobbed. Looked like the wake wasn’t going to be as dull as I’d thought.

My mother gave me that look, rolling her eyes and twisting her face as she usually did when confronted with such attention-seeking behaviour.

So engrossed were we in this little family drama, that at first the muffled roars of rage from the coffin went unnoticed.

But then there was a loud snapping sound and the lid of the box sprang open…

But that night something had made me opt for Salisbury Crags, Arthur Seat’s idiot offspring, alone but for the wind tangling my hair and the scent of damp earth. Something niggled at the back of my mind and then fled, giggling, before I could catch it.

I had reached the Radical Road, the pathway that curved around the Crags like an old scar carved out of reptilian skin. My way up to the top was lit by the mauve phosphorescence of corpse candles, behind and below me lay the rust coloured miasma of city lights, like old blood on a corpse long dead.

As I climbed, a breeze ruffled over my skin, carrying with it the scent of spring and the promise of another sullen east coast Edinburgh summer. My menagerie had gone on ahead and was even now sending back images of our prey: a biker gang, lured here by the siren song of strong drugs leavened with S and M action but who were destined for so much more before the night was out.

I stopped for a moment all the better to savour what I had been sent; the weight of the gang’s murderous past and present as plain to my little dark-adapted eyes as Jacob Marley’s chains, each link a misdeed that could not be undone, an outrage that could not be forgiven. The huge and bloated elementals that had attached themselves to each and every gang member were testimony to that.

Against the darkness, the dim glamour of their crimes signalled their presence to me and mine like a beacon. But tonight there was something else hunting in the Park of the Holy Rood, something infinitely worse than a dozen Hell’s Angels painting the city blood red.

Something worse, even, than me.

The corpse-candles were still buzzing around my head, intent on leading me to my death over the Crags and exposing my position to whatever was out there. The wind turned chill, reminding me that I still had my own monsters to find and revenge to wreak.

After all, as my old mother might have said if I’d ever met her: “Do unto others before they do unto you.”

A morning mist hung low over frost slimed grass. Branches of trees pierced the grey gloom like the petrified carcasses of unnameable beasts.

This was the Meadows, slap bang in the middle of a city of half a million souls that now felt as distant as the stars: an island of live greenery in a desiccated urban wasteland. Or so it must have seemed to the horned creature that had padded this way earlier on taloned feet, the old presences stirred by its passage.

My quarry was near.

In the bad old days the Meadows had been submerged under a body of water that stretched from Hope Park Terrace to Brougham Street, contaminated by raw sewage and worse. When the water had been drained it took the human waste with it, but the spiritual effluent remained, keeping me in a job and the city in fear.

I almost walked into the vast trunk of an old elm and cursed my clumsiness aloud drawing the attention of another predator out on the prowl this fine Sunday morning. A low, throaty laugh, the caress of light breath on the back of my neck and I knew I had much more to worry about than the minor demon I’d been hunting.

The Ice Cream Man drove along Constitution Street, the strains of Greensleeves trailing a sweet discord in his wake. It was two in the morning and raining hard, but the Ice Cream Man had no need for lights and window-wipers. Truth to tell they disturbed his concentration and that was Bad For Business.

A muffled sob from the back of the van told him that they weren’t all dead yet. Never mind, they’d soon wish they were. The hunger was on him tonight, an appetite that was getting harder to satisfy. Sometimes he wasn’t even sure it was all worth it. In those darker moods that seemed to take him more and more these days, all he wanted was to burn the world down and him with it.

But not tonight, not yet.

A police squad car passed by, the occupants blind and deaf to the ice cream van’s siren song – unlike the unfortunates he’d caught and stacked in the back. It was too easy really and the boredom made him cruel. Take last night for instance…

He smiled to himself and began to whistle, the world beyond the windscreen a smeared blur of light and shadow. Another sob from the back but he was oblivious, lost in the downward spiral of his own thoughts.

But the instant she woke and came to the window, face a pale oval, smooth and perfect as an egg, he was roused from his reverie.

“Come on down Cathy,” he intoned through the loudspeaker. “I’ve got your favourite. Just pop some slippers on sweetheart. I’ve got a special surprise for you in the back. Best get it while it’s cold though.”

I had the dream again last night, always the same sequence of events, the same cataclysmic outcome. Except now I was dreaming it every night, proof as if any were needed that it was about to become reality.

It starts with me drying myself after a shower in the bathroom. I go over to the mirrored medicine cabinet on the wall, rooting around for something I can never find. As I open it, something catches my eye, a flash of movement, I’m never entirely sure. I slowly adjust the mirrored door knowing I’m being watched I rub the steam away and see the outline of a young woman standing directly behind me, clouds of water vapour eddying over her.

I whirl around and she puts her finger to her lips with one hand holding out the other with an odd formality as though asking me to dance. An alien thrumming through my head tells me she’s dead, although the solidity of her body belies that fact. But it’s her face that disturbs me the most: devoid of features apart from two indentations where the eye sockets should have been. What passes for skin is malleable like putty as though flattened by inefficient careless fingers, leaving bumps and ridges in their wake. She’s dripping from head to toe and her dirty white dress is torn and hanging off one shoulder.

I try to call out but my voice has deserted me and I know I’m alone. With her.

She moves towards me, the mottled flesh of her narrow frame discernable through the thin fabric of her dress. I press myself as flat against the wall as I can, eager to put as much space between us as possible not least because my traitorous legs are about to give way. I try again to shout, but can’t summon the breath and begin to choke as I fight for air.

My own power blazes through my bones and before I can direct it, bursts from me slashing the thing’s face and body; again and again until I lose count. Bright blood wells to the surface of the featureless face like jagged red mouths and there is a pause as though the world is holding its breath before it begins to gush onto the floor in a waterfall of red ruin. Something is moving around beneath the skin like a frightened rodent and the more I cut, the more excitable the burrower becomes. I throw myself to the left towards the bathroom door, but the bloodied figure gives me a contemptuous, almost lazy swipe that connects with my shoulders. I hit my head off the tiles, and feel a warm wetness running down my face and pooling beneath me as it cools. My vision blurs and I fight to stay conscious, but it’s only a matter of time.

I can only see the creature’s bare feet from my vantage point on the floor and now they begin to walk towards me slowly, no need to rush, not now. With a detachment born of blood loss and shock, I watch it approach, stand over me for what seems like an age and then it squats down beside me, so I can see its face. The wounds I’ve slashed into its skin gape wide and move of their own volition. Inside the raw meat, the wet flick of an eye, the extrusion of a decayed tooth roils in fevered constant motion. I whimper and try to edge away but I can’t move, can’t call out, can’t get out of this one.

All I could see of the beast at the bottom of the garden was a pair of red eyes shining out from the thicket where it hid. A trail of blood on the grass told me it was wounded and all the more dangerous for it.

The question was: what flavour of beastie was I entertaining in my own backyard? Judging by the neon glare it wasn’t one of the usual suspects. Or at least none of the critters that usually roamed the mean streets of Bruntsfield.

A low, trickling growl grew in ambition to a full throated roar. What the hell was I going to do with the damn thing? It wasn’t exactly a SSPCA or council call-out because if it was what I suspected, everyone would die. And die hard as Bruce Willis would no doubt have said if he’d known.

Then I remembered the steak in the fridge. It was to have been my Sunday night treat: burned to a crisp and washed down with a bottle of Talisker. Now it was bait for whatever skulked in the bushes. A beast whose tastes, I was willing to bet, were rather more rarefied than my own.

An icy north wind nipped the back of my neck and I noticed for the first time that no birds sang. It would be dark soon and whatever it was I was going to do, I needed to do it now. I turned to head back to the house until a desperate rasp stopped me in my tracks.

It took a few precious moments to figure it out, but when I did there was no cigar.

There was something about the three blonde, black-eyed women that was not quite right. At least that was Colin’s opinion as he finished one pint and considered starting another. His thoughts turned as they always did to his bitch ex Jackie, who was giving him grief and not letting him see the wee man until he paid what she said he owed. Fat chance of that when he’d just lost his job in the off-licence where he had worked for ten years. Who could have predicted offies in Scotland would ever go out of business? You had to get through the cold, smothering dark of the winter months somehow and it had long been a family tradition that a vast quantity of booze was just the way to do it.

He decided on another pint and whisky chaser and lumbered unsteadily to the bar to get them in. The Bingo Wings was a run-down sort of place, but you could sit in the gloom and nurse drink and grievances in equal measure with no interference from anyone who knew what was good for them. So the hot glances thrown his way from the blond bints, weren’t really what he’d come to expect from his inner sanctum, least of all on a blustery Tuesday afternoon. No, talent-spotting wasn’t the usual pastime in the Bingo Wings and there were other more likely venues for that sort of nonsense. This was where silent, angry men sat and drank themselves into a well earned oblivion before picking a fight outside to round the evening off.

Christ they were fit though: lush, full figured and from the long legs, not much shy of his six feet frame. He thought maybe they’d been to a fancy dress party because they were all dressed in white see-through dress things that rode right up when they sat down on the bar stools, so you could pretty much see everything. Little tarts.

The nearest one turned her head to look at him, a sinuous, twisting motion accompanied by a fall of white-blond hair that was so long she could have sat on it. Well, if the little slag played her cards right, she’d be sitting on something else before the end of the night.

“Are you sisters then?” he said controlling the slurring with a mighty effort.

The other two turned to stare at him with that same serpentine motion and three pairs of black eyes fixed on his face as though he was the most fascinating creature in the world. Probably couldn’t believe their luck. They must have been sisters because their features were almost identical. There was also a sharpness about the nose and cheek-bones that he hadn’t noticed at first, but they were still stunners, no doubt about it.

“In a way,” the nearest one answered in a soft voice.

She was definitely up for it. Wait until Jackie found out that he still had the old one, two magic.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Eh, Colin. Colin McQuarrie. Yours?” he asked, finally remembering the finer points of leg-over etiquette.
“Margo. And this is Morgan and Marjorie.”

The blond in the middle, Morgan, slid gracefully off her stool and came to stand next to him. Maybe he’d be in a three-way before the night was out if he minded his p’s and q’s. He hurriedly calculated just how much he’d had to drink because it really wouldn’t do to disappoint the ladies. Not if the abuse Jackie had regularly showered him with was anything to go by.

Morgan put a hand on his arm and was so close he could smell her: an intoxicating scent that brought with it the green promise of spring woods. He was just about to press his mouth to hers and maybe even give her a bit of tongue, when she ruined the moment by speaking. That was women for you.

“Did you know you have an elemental attached to you?”

“An elephant? Are you pissed hen?”

The third blond, Marjorie had joined them and stood on his other side. He felt hemmed in for some reason and started to wonder where Rab the barman was; quelling a sudden surge of adrenalin as though some part of his brain was telling him to make a run for it. Why would he run from three lassies?

“An elemental,”

“It’s a lower form of spirit-”

“That attaches itself to people who have done bad things in their lives. It feeds off the energy that creates-”

“And for every bad deed, the elemental gets bigger-”

“And bigger and-”

“Yours is the size of a tenement. And it’s still growing. You must have been a very naughty boy Colin.”

He’d lost track of who was saying what but it didn’t matter because it melded into a seamless whole as though the conversation was taking place entirely inside his own head. The three hadn’t taken their eyes off him, tracking his progress like a deer or some other prey that didn’t have a hope in hell. Being hopeless had never felt so good.

“You know those angry, frustrated feelings you get where you want to burn the world and everybody in it?”

He was pretty sure that was Marjorie who was stroking his arm, snaking a trail up to the back of his neck. Dumbly he nodded.

“That’s from the elemental. Sort of like waste products if you see what I mean. You’ll have noticed how it’s getting worse no doubt? That’s the elemental getting stronger. Soon it’ll be powerful enough to swallow your soul. While you’re still alive I mean. You’ll be little more than a walking, talking corpse. Isn’t that something?” Margo smiled. Was it just his imagination, or were her teeth more prominent than they had been a moment ago?

He was really confused now, unsure if it was the drink or if the women had drugged him. He wasn’t sure he cared, as long as they stayed with him.

“Can’t I get rid of it? I mean, couldn’t you help me?” he said, like a little boy pleading not to be sent to bed. He didn’t question the truth of what he was being told: it was as if he’d always known. Ever since that hit and run that he’d been responsible for as a teenager and then all the other stuff since then…

“Ah, now. We were just getting to that,” said Morgan. “But first there’s something you need to do for us.”

Whatever was waiting at the end of the alley, it was something long dead.
And yet, judging by the roars of rage and the maelstrom of rubbish battering the surrounding buildings, that something was not prepared to concede the fact. A little unsteadily, on account of all the whiskey I’d consumed at the World’s End pub, chosen because the name suited my mood, I made my way towards the epicentre.

The sharp crack of a window smashing, the unmistakable tinkle of glass and the thing paused for a heart-beat, as though surprised at its own strength and then the onslaught resumed with renewed frenzy. Walking through the flying shards of assorted crap, arm raised to ward off the worst of it, I was bloodied but still curious.

Which was a shame really because if ever there was a moment when a kindly fate I didn’t believe in should have intervened, turning me back to wend my weary, drunken way home instead of into the belly of the beast, it was then.

The air crackled with static as it rushed me like a rabid dog, maw vast, flayed flanks heaving. Bigger than a grizzly, it pinned me with ease to the ground with talons that sliced through the meat of my shoulders faster than a hot knife through butter.

“Roseeeee,” it growled as drool from its mis-matched jaws fell in ropes across my upturned face.

“You could always just ask for a date like normal people,” I wheezed, forcing myself to lie still in the forlorn hope of minimising further damage to my abused flesh.

The skinned features moved and shiny, black bone protruded through the small craters in its head. It was only as my consciousness began to spot and fade that I realised it was smiling.

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Who am I?

Well that's a good question and on bad days I'm not sure I know the answer.

My name though is Rose Garnett and I hunt down among the dead men in Edinburgh's necropolis. These story fragments are jagged little pills from my own personal stash; free, gratis and for nothing. For those of a more delicate disposition, there's always the Dead Central Soundtrack to help the medicine go down.

And to the select few wise enough to know nothing is for free, these little peep holes will reveal what's really waiting on the other side. Who knows, if you're very unlucky it may even be me...